Wallabies legend Matt Burke has highlighted the importance of forward dominance, which he feels is crucial for Australia to become one of the top teams at international level again.<\/p>\n
The 2025 international season was a topsy-turvy one for the Wallabies as they only won four out of 14 Tests played during the year.<\/p>\n
They started their campaign with a narrow victory over Fiji in Newcastle and then lost successive Tests against the British & Irish Lions in Brisbane and Melbourne before finishing off that series with a win over the famous touring team in Sydney.<\/p>\n
The Wallabies<\/a> then caused arguably the biggest upset of the year when they claimed a shock victory over the Springboks in their Rugby Championship clash in Johannesburg, before beating Argentina in that competition in Townsville.<\/p>\n However, the rest of the Rugby Championship saw Australia suffering defeats to the Boks and Los Pumas in the return matches in Cape Town and Sydney respectively before they lost both their Tests against the All Blacks in Auckland and Perth.<\/p>\n Lost all their end-of-year tour Tests<\/p>\n Joe Schmidt and his troops then headed on their end-of-year tour but, despite being competitive in all their matches, they failed to register a win as they were beaten by England, Italy, Ireland and France.<\/p>\n Burke<\/a>, who was part of a very successful Australian side and made 81 Test appearances for them between 1993 and 2004, believes the Wallabies are on the right track with head coach Schmidt.<\/p>\n The New Zealand-born coach is set to step down from his position after next year\u2019s mid-year internationals, with current Queensland Reds boss Les Kiss replacing Schmidt at the Wallabies.<\/p>\n \u201cI take you back to before the Irish game (on Australia\u2019s end-of-year tour), there was a lot of pressure on the Aussies to do it,\u201d Burke told the DSPN<\/a> podcast with Martin Devlin.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was sitting there (on) commentary with (ex-Wallabies captain) Michael Hooper and we chatted beforehand and he basically turned around and looked at me and goes: \u2018Mate, you blokes ruined it for us. You won everything, like how are we supposed to follow that?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we did have a really good era, I think we had every trophy in the cabinet for that period of time there from World Cups to Bledisloe to Tri-Nations and (against) the individual countries and there was a consistency in amongst the team.<\/p>\n